On Nov 6, 10:41*am, Giles wrote:
On Nov 6, 8:05*am, Injun Joe wrote:

Giles, I have for years enjoyed your illumating articles on Roff.
Most of them have been read then printed for future *study and
thought !
If you have time and interest would enjoy something about

Occipital cradleboard deformation by American indians--was amused to
learn that the Flathead tribe *were called "flatheads " because the
did not practice OCD

Funny you should mention that. *I recently finished and submitted for
publication an article, "Why do People do that?: An Exhaustive
Historical Overview of Inscrutable Parental Intervention in the Lives
of Children" in which I examine in exhaustive detail what appear, to
outside observers, to be bizarre and inexplicable cultural practices.
Take, for a brief example, the Enlightenment Era sartorial fashion of
wearing high and constrictive collars; all well and good if that's
what lifts your skirt but when inflicted by paternal fiat on tender
youths in the full flower of growth and rushing blood, it resulted,
not surprisingly (from our modern medical perspective), in the
rounding and prominent swelling of the head so noticeable in many well
known figures of the time (n.b. Oliver Cromwell, Edward Montagu, Lord
Fairfax). *Foot binding, OCD, prenatal exposure to Wagner,
circumcision......it's all the same stuff.....and all for the same
reasons.

So, why do they do it? *For the usual reasons. Conformity (often
egregiously mislabeled as a sense of community), prestige,
empowerment, sadism.....in short, because they can. *But a detailed
anaysis reveals what many have intuited over the centuries yut has
never before been articulated......well, at least never before so
lucidly and conclusively. *Economics! *Yep, it's all about money.
What made the connection so difficult to ferret out is the fact that
the dominant paradigm, the favored economic model, has changed
continually over time and varied by geographical location and cultural
context. *Whereas in some societies (e.g. Tlingit, Nuu-Chah-Nulth,
Haida, et al.) an apparent staccato economic largess might prevail, in
others (our own quaint interpretation of capitalism comes fairly
readily to mind) an evidently antipodal model like conspicuous
consumption (cf. J.H. Holliday, R.L. Stevenson, etc.) holds sway. *I
won't bore you with the details (the arguments are admittedly rather
long and abstruse for the non-specialist) for now. *See the full
article for tables, graphs, statistical legerdemain.

First submitted to the Journal of Irreproducible Results:

www.jir.com/

(who, unaccountably and rather rudely returned it with an attached
sticky note on which someone had scrawled a dismissive
"yeah.....right"), the article is scheduled to appear in the Spring
2010 issue of the "Journal Of Keynesian Ethnography".

Opie -what ever happened to that gal up your way who was studying
prehistoric indians ?

Good question.

giles

p.s. Three common 8 letter words. All three are adjectives having to
do
with the same broad category of biological necessity. All three
begin
with the same letter. Two begin with the same two letter sequence.
All three end with the same two letter sequence. Two end with the
same three letter sequence. There is one repeated letter.


giles.
it might take a while but given all those hints.....